That lick of good ol’ honest filmmaking is enough to gloss over many an underwritten scene or overwritten soliloquy, but this film remains washed up, without that all-absolving coat of paint.Īnyway, back to the story. It sorely lacks that magic touch, that trademark broadstroke of Hirani sincerity. And while it borrows its principal cast from Rang De Basanti and a vibe from younger-voiced filmmakers like Nagesh Kukunoor and Akhtar, it never quite gets going. This is a film, as you have gleaned from the inescapably omnipresent publicity material, about three students in an engineering college. There are a few moments which click, but coming from the duo that created the finest film this decade, this is a massive letdown. The result is a confused film, one that doesn’t know exactly where it stands, torn between lump-in-the-throat filmmaking and amateurishly written juvenilia. 3 Idiots is a very average bit of fluffy Bollywood masala that tragically pretends, at times, to be making a profound point, one it loses in repetition. But it’s a role he can do in his sleep.ĭitto for Hirani and his partner in wordplay, Abhijat Joshi. For the actor, it’s probably yet another disguise, that of the young man. Why must Aamir Khan, a man who told us of the last day of college 21 years ago, still play a fresh-faced student? He does adequately, and is impressively bereft of age-lines, but we really have seen it all before. Why, you ask yourself, does a college film have to be made with middle-aged men playing the lead? Can we not trust younger actors to deliver, or has the insecurity of the star system blinded us to all reality? There’s also a tragic, overriding feeling of futility. The word is a pun on the character’s best friend, Farhan, and while it may be a non-existant gag word in the film, the compound seems to exist in real life - Hirani’s film is doused liberally with Farhanitrate (in an Akhtar sense of the word) and several other directorial scents - including Hirani’s own touch, which is why by the time the end credits eventually roll around, you have a ‘been there, sniffed that’ feeling about it all.
In Rajkumar Hirani’s latest film, a character steps to a blackboard and chalks up, for the benefit of a befuddled engineering college classroomful of students, the word ‘Farhanitrate,’ daring them to tell him what it means.
0 kommentar(er)
